Android Devices on risk,warns Google

The officials have already uncovered one unidentified Google Play app that attempted to exploit the vulnerability, although they said they didn't consider the app to be doing so for malicious purposes.

Google can't patch all the android devices but it has judged a number of rooting apps are dangerous enough.

The unnamed rooting apps, which are available in Google Play and outside its app store, could lead to a "local permanent device.

Google has also confirmed that a publicly available rooting app could also compromise the Nexus 6.

The company has also updated the Android Verify Apps security feature to detect the rooting app. Though the company has not noticed any exploitation but it said that the user would need to install the rooting app manually for a device to be compromised.

This makes it exceedingly hard to develop applications that depend on features in the Linux kernel. This may be part of the reason Netflix supports HD on so few Android devices if it depends on kernel-level security features.Even Nexus devices don't get major updates to the kernel version. A Nexus device that shipped with 3.8.x is very likely to stay on 3.8.x, even as newer Nexus devices come with more recent versions. This is the super weird fragmentation of Android. Linux kernel versions (and thus, features and security) used in Android are completely unrelated to the version of Android on the device.

This makes it exceedingly hard to develop applications that depend on features in the Linux kernel. This may be part of the reason Netflix supports HD on so few Android devices if it depends on kernel-level security features.Note that even Nexus devices don't get major updates to the kernel version. A Nexus device that shipped with 3.8.x is very likely to stay on 3.8.x, even as newer Nexus devices come with more recent versions.ns.